A Hermeneutic Study of Staircases in the SPACE Building Designed by Kim Swoo GeunLee, Min Jung; Lee, Dong-Eon;

Abstract

From an ontological perspective, as Gadamer explains in his fusion of horizons, an understanding of the world is achieved through prejudice and experience guiding understanding of the present shaped by the past. This research takes this ontological view and distills it into a set of assumptions. Using the hermeneutic circle, these implicit assumptions are made explicit through a review of the literature on staircases, and the end result is a critique of the staircases of Kim Swoo Geun's SPACE building. As hermeneutics takes the parts of the whole as a representation of the whole, this study can be seen as a critique of not only Kim Swoo Geun's SPACE building as a whole, but also Korean architecture in general.